Chapter Text
“…so if you want to arrest me, arrest me. You know where to find me,” she finishes without flinching, making direct eye contact with every person in front of her.
Cameras flash the moment she rises from her seat and her phone starts buzzing in her pocket. A text. Clint must’ve been watching.
The sun finally welcomes her when she steps out of the building and she basks in it for a moment. Being a fugitive chasing down HYDRA and living in underground safe houses had its thrills, but she’s missed being in the open without worrying she might get shot.
She slips into Central Park, appreciating the calm around her. Families, couples, drinks growing uncomfortably warm under the sun, kids laughing. She’s going to have to disappear for a while - but she decides she can have a few hours to herself.
Natasha finally checks her phone, giving a small smile she cannot hide as she replies.
Clint: Hot.
Natasha: Shut up.
Clint: I cannot believe you didn’t call me.
Natasha: You were in the middle of nowhere in Jordan.
“And I would’ve returned had you let me know what the hell was going on.” Clint appears right next to her with a few quick steps and it only earns him an eye-roll.
“What, you’ve been following me now?”
“Yes, just making sure I’m not missing any other huge event where the organization I risk my life for is not run by the fucking Nazis and I’m left unemployed by the end of the day.” Clint gives her an annoyed look and she honestly does not have a good enough argument on it.
Exchanging one evil organization for another was not on her bingo card when she joined SHIELD. She does not want to think back about all the missions she’s been involved in and what they were possibly used for. Her whole life has been trying to undo the damage Red Room has done to her and made her do - which turned out to be a huge fucking joke.
Nothing. You’re nothing more than a weapon to be used and discarded.
“Clint, you were doing God knows what in the middle of nowhere. I’m not calling you as back-up from thousands of miles away. We had it handled.”
“Yeah? Your arm tells me a different story.”
“I didn’t say we handled it well. There was a murderous super soldier on the loose.” She gives a shrug, ignoring the pain caused by the wound in her arm. She sits down on a bench and Clint follows her lead.
“‘Tasha..” He sighs, rubbing his temple. She knows that tone. A lecture is brewing. “So it’s true. He’s alive.”
“Yes.” She replies, hoping her voice does not betray her.
The Winter Soldier is alive. And he’s Steve’s long lost best friend. She’s been compartmentalizing that fact ever since he appeared on that bridge and tried to murder them both. James has betrayed her in a different way that has not and will not ever heal. Trying to murder her would not even make the list. She clears her throat and takes a deep breath, hoping to focus on.. something. Anything else.
“I’m not letting you do this again. I’m not letting you go after him and get yourself killed for it.” Clint says, trying to make eye-contact but she cannot bring herself to look at him.
She almost got Clint killed for it, didn’t she? Because she was an idiot hoping for a happy ending with a brainwashed super soldier who tried to kill her more than once. The guilt weighs on her. She and Clint have saved each other countless times, over and over again, but she never risked his life for something as dumb as her inexplicable need for closure from James for his betrayal. She’s spent 8 months looking for him after he shot her in Odessa, until Clint almost died and she realized she couldn’t lose Clint over this - even though she did, in some ways. When he finally stopped initiating anything with her, when he lost hope that she’d ever get over James & went on that date with Laura.
Laura is great. She loves Laura.. and she’s very good at pretending she does not feel the tiniest bit of jealousy & resentment when she visits their farmhouse. A perfect life she cannot ever have. Laura is good at pretending, too. She pretends Clint and Natasha have never been anything more than friends. She pretends she and Natasha could be good friends.
She’s grateful for being a part of their family at times. She doesn’t believe in love and it’s not a life she could give Clint. She’s happy he has everything he wants, even though a part of her resents him a bit for it.
She’s startled out of her thoughts when Clint caresses her cheek with the back of his thumb ever so slightly and gives her an expecting look. “Natasha. I don’t know what he’s done to you but - “
“I won’t go after him,” she interrupts, finally turning to meet his eyes. She knows Clint has always been bothered by the fact that she never told him the whole story. Perhaps the only secret in their friendship. “I promise.”
“Good,” he replies, knowing pressing any further on it will only push Natasha to hide secrets from him. “Now, about the unemployment thing…”
“Didn’t you keep talking about retirement?” Natasha teases, smirking.
“Yeah, in like… 5 years or something.” Clint protests. “What do we do now? Or even better - what shitty things did we do for HYDRA that we need to clean up after now?”
“Don’t go there please. I’ve already had my “Everything I knew and almost died for turned out to be a fucking lie” crisis with Steve. Not going down that rabbit hole again.”
“Great. I talk about retirement for like two seconds and you already replaced me with the golden boy.”
She rolls her eyes at him, again, with a soft grin on her face. They both know it’s not true - no one could replace Clint in her life. She owes him too much for too many things. “I mean, he’s cute. Definitely less annoying than you, as well. The shield is nice, too.”
“Shut up.”
Her grin disappears into a nostalgic smile as she leans back on the bench, tilting her head. “Seriously though, you’re not going to retire? Not even take a break to spend some time with Laura and the kids? Even I’m planning a nice vacation - sun, beach and unlimited mediocre cocktails at Bodrum.”
“Ooh, Turkey. Can I come?”
“Clint,” Natasha says, hoping to urge him to focus on the right question.
“Right,” he sighs. “Sure, I’ll take a break.. for a few weeks. Then what? I’m an Avenger, it’s not like I can go back to a boring desk job and I'm not sure if I even want one.”
“I heard Sharon is interviewing for a job with the CIA.”
“Yeah, maybe. And if I do find something for us there, will you come?” He asks and the hopeful look in his eyes breaks her heart a little.
They’ve spent the last two decades working side by side. He’s grieving the loss of their routine, in a way. The boring meetings at the office, the pranks they pulled on Coulson, the amount of shit they went together in missions but always came back to a safe house to watch some sitcom as they patched each other up. It’s not normal per anyone’s standards, but it’s their normal. She grieves it, too. The world gets crazier every day and it only continues to push them apart. Her eyes well up but she manages to blink the tears away before they fall.
“I don’t think I’ll ever work for any organization after realizing I’ve spent half my life thinking I finally escaped the Red Room and I was doing something good - something to help people, only to realize I’ve been working for their biggest ally.”
“We did good,” Clint starts but his protest is weak. “Look, I know it doesn’t feel like it but we did help people. Not all of it was a lie. I mean - we did have direct orders from Fury many times, didn’t we? He is not HYDRA.” A pause. “..right?”
Natasha snorts at the idea. “He isn’t.”
“See? It wasn’t all lies and manipulation.”
She shrugs, needing to steer the conversation away before she lets anything slip about her next move. “Maybe. I don’t know. Bodrum first and I’ll see you when I come back, okay? I need some time to think.”
No protests follow this time. Natasha leans in to give him a kiss on the cheek and they briefly hug before she leaves him alone.
Decoding HYDRA’s files is not a simple job, she is reminded once again, when she takes a look at the time and realizes she’s been spending the last 6 hours on the same documents. Some of the files are protected by passwords, some are encrypted in much more complex methods. Some of them she’s familiar with, some of them she has to call a few friends for. The files she’s looking for, especially, are the ones that are maintained with the highest secrecy.
The Winter Soldier.
She shuts her eyes, hoping to suppress the nervousness in her system, putting all cells in her body on alert. She lied to Clint. Of course she did, because that’s what she does and because she cannot ever risk his life for this again. Not when he has a family waiting for him now. She takes a deep breath and continues her search.
The Winter Soldiers missions, some of their failed experiments, some information on different HYDRA safe houses. Almost all of them too outdated for her to feel confident in seeking him out again.
He betrayed you, her mind reminders her again as it often does. You loved him but he lied to you.
The sharp crack of her cup hitting the floor snaps her out of it. “Shit,” she curses, leaning down to pick up the broken pieces. Natasha throws whatever has remained of the glass into the trash and picks up the mop to wipe the spilt contents of it. And just as she is about to turn around towards the kitchen, a very familiar word on the screen catches her eye.
Dreykov. She frowns, instinctively sitting down. The agent on this mission has noted down experiments on mind control, some information exchange on different trials with HYDRA and various mentions of their “common goal”. An army of exclusively selected individuals, mind-controlled & planted all over the world - from small villages to being the partners of presidents, to board members of the most influential companies in the world.
The Black Widows and The Super Soldiers.
She freezes, trying to comprehend what she’s just read. “No,” she finally whispers to herself. "We killed Dreykov. This is old. This *has to be* old. Something that didn’t work..”
Natasha scrolls up in panic, only to see the date marked as January 2012. Two years ago. 10 years after she thought she’d killed him and ended the Red Room program.
Her hands tremble as she frantically combs through every decrypted document. Dreykov’s name appears again and again, haunting the pages like a ghost she thought she’d buried long ago.
Her stomach twists. The walls seem to close in, pressing in on all sides. She feels small, trapped in a life she’s spent years trying to escape, unable to breathe. She runs to the bathroom, throwing up until there’s nothing left in her, fighting herself to not cry. Natasha manages to sit up, pushing herself against the bathroom wall. She pulls her legs against her chest, wraps her arms around them and rests her head on her knees.
She’s never been good at feeling, and right now, she’s too overwhelmed to feel anything. Her mind is blank. She stays still, staring at the wall in front of her, reduced to the soulless girl they’d made her out to be once again.
The weak buzzing of her phone is the thing that finally breaks her out of her trance. She manages to get up and wash her face. Natasha squints when the sunlight reaches her, giving her a rough estimate of how long her emotional breakdown lasted. All night and a few more hours, it seems.
The screen reads “Steve” and she tries to put on her best acting voice when she answers.
Natalia Romanova might cry and scream and get hurt. Natasha Romanoff, however, does not. They might get to know Natasha Romanoff, but rarely anyone gets to know Natalia Romanova.
"Hey,” she finally picks up the phone.
“Romanoff,” he greets and she can almost see him smiling. “Loved that last line, by the way. One hell of an exit.”
She half-laughs at that, shaking her head. “I’m not sure they liked it as much as you did.”
“Well, neither of us is arrested yet, so I assume you were at least right if not the most likable in the moment.”
“I always am,” she says and there’s an awkward but pregnant silence. “Spit it out, Rogers. What do you want?”
“Bucky,” he says after a moment of silence. “I need to find him, Nat. I don’t know where to start but I need to find him - is there any chance you can pull a few strings and give me at least a starting point?”
Compartmentalize, she reminds herself as she feels herself panicking. If Steve goes looking for James, at least you know he will be less likely to come after you when you hunt down Dreykov.
“I can,” she says and hears him sigh with relief. “Steve, you know it won’t be easy, right?”
“I know, but I have to try.” Comes the expected response.
“Fine, I’ll see what I can do. Give me a few days, okay?”
“Sure,” he replies, “Thank you for everything, Nat.”
A few days of more digging does not provide her the amount of information she hopes it does - neither on the Winter Soldier nor the Red Room. She clings to the file in her hands tightly as she approaches Steve and greets Sam with a nod.
“You should be honored, that's about as close as he gets to saying thank you,” she says as Fury disappears behind them.
“Not going with him?” Steve nods towards the former director, hopeful to get a negative answer. She knows he’d much rather have her with him on this hunt for the Winter Soldier.
“No.”
“Not staying here?” He adds and she realizes he knows her better than she thinks he does. Guilt presses on her conscience - he does not know anything about her past with his best friend, a secret she’s kept very close to her heart. Eventually, she will disappoint him with the truth, but she knows today is not the day.
“I blew all my covers, I gotta go figure out a new one.”
“That might take a while.”
“I’m counting on it. That thing you asked for, I called in a few favors from Kiev,” she hands him the file, giving an understanding smile. “And will you do me a favor? Call that nurse.”
“She's not a nurse.”
“And you're not a SHIELD agent,” she smirks.
“What was her name again?”
“Sharon. She's nice.” Natasha leans in, kissing him on the cheek as a goodbye. “Be careful, Steve. You might not want to pull on that thread.”
As she walks away, she shuts down the part of her brain screaming to find James, and starts planning out her next move.